After my external Maxtor went dead opened it it and it lead me here . My segate 7200.11 was bsy. I didnt have anything lying around. but some old computer parts , square speak plugins that had to be filled down and an arduino mega. I never even downloaded the drivers for the arduino .This is was its first use. Noticing that the mega had a rx tx I plugged it in hooked it up went into device manager put it on the appropriate com port with the correct baud rate. Ran putty in serial mode. Ran rx0 , tx0 in a loop on the arduino to see If I would get back what I sent. All was good . Followed the steps as stated . Not sure if this was mentioned in this 4 year thread but arduino works fine as a max 232 substitute. I would bet a home made DB25 Jtag would also. Mark